


The Ring

by soldez



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Friends to Lovers, High School, M/M, Other, Romance, Smeddie, Wrestling, steddie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 22:31:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15672597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soldez/pseuds/soldez
Summary: In which Eddie Kaspbrak gets ripped, Stanley Uris takes a phone call, and Mike Hanlon joins a fan club.





	The Ring

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: unsanitary; emetophobia  
> 

For years, he hid his escape.

Eddie Kaspbrak had never been sure of what he was supposed to be; he just knew he wasn’t it. Every second of his life seemed to be the body of a cruel universe’s argument essay that he just wasn’t enough. Growing up, he went with it, mostly because he didn’t know not to--at six years old, when your mother shoves a gummy vitamin in your face, you eat it. Eddie was sixteen years old now, and still, it was gummy vitamin after gummy vitamin, pill after pill, and he’d lost track of how many days Sonia Kaspbrak had made him stay home from school. He knew he’d never be the sensitive, innocent boy he was meant to be, and thus, he needed an escape.

Wrestling. Eddie first discovered the sport when he was nine and had caught a glimpse of the TV before his mother had changed the channel. It was glamorous, it was sweaty, and it was everything Eddie wasn’t allowed.

“What’s that?” nine-year-old Eddie had wondered.

“Nothing for you,” Sonia Kaspbrak had replied.

The next day, Eddie had spent hours trying to body-slam his best friend Bill Denbrough in the way the guy on TV had. He couldn’t.

Since that climactic day, Eddie found solace in the 3 AM wrestling programs he snuck downstairs to watch with the volume off. Something about the ring, the sweat, and the grit was magical beyond belief. He wanted it.

In tenth grade, when Eddie was sixteen years old, he found his wrestling ring. Granted, it was a lot smaller than he’d imagined, and with less of a crowd. It also smelled a lot worse than he would have liked.

The Derry High wrestling room was accessible only through a hallway that was only accessible through a staircase that was only accessible through a closet that was only accessible through a metal door in the wall of the gymnasium. They built it back when a wrestling team seemed like a plausible idea for the school, and never bothered to tear down the wall’s mats and transform the room after discovering that no one was interested. At some point between then and now, some kid had broken the lock on the door, and the faculty didn’t care enough to replace it. Typically, the few students who knew about the room utilized it to smoke and fuck. Eddie found it through Stan.

Stan Uris, who Eddie had once seen vomit with anxiety before a presentation in front of twenty students, had recently discovered a love for theatre. At the beginning of the year, he joined stage crew for the winter musical, expecting to be the least experienced on set. Stan, being Stan, turned out to be a big shot in the theatre geek department, and he’d enjoyed every second of it. From Eddie’s understanding, the stage manager had gotten unexpectedly ill halfway through the show, and Stan had stepped in for the role. Since then, he’d done everything from props, to management, to lights and sound, which he was doing for the spring show now--and to think he was only in ninth grade. Although Eddie couldn’t relate in the slightest to Stan’s sudden passion, he kind of understood; the theatre was to Stan everything that wrestling was to Eddie.

Because he managed both lights and sound, (few people had signed up for stage crew and most were needed on set) Stan had the booth upstairs all to himself. This meant Eddie following him upstairs on days when he had rehearsal because Stan was the only one who could explain Eddie’s Biology homework in terms he understood. It also meant walking past the wrestling room, Eddie consequently noticing the wrestling room, and Eddie falling in love with the wrestling room. He didn’t tell Stan that, of course.

“So, I was--huh? What’s in there?”

“That? Oh, that’s the wrestling room. It smells in there.”

“... Huh. Interesting.”

Since then, Eddie began sneaking up to the room as much as he could. Some days he would tell his mom he was in a knitting club, and do his homework there after school. Some days, he’d pretend he was in the ring, practicing the moves he saw on TV late at night. And, yeah, Stan was right--it did smell like hundred-year-old sweat, cum, and cigarettes. Somehow, Eddie didn’t mind one bit.

At least, until someone else did.

Stan Uris took one look at Eddie with his face mashed into that dusty mat, tackling his backpack as an imaginary opponent, and dropped his neatly-annotated script all over the floor.

“Eddie.”

“Uh... hi?”

“Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

Eddie hadn’t realized how heavy the pressure of having a secret hobby weighed on his chest until he told Stan everything, all while he cleaned Eddie’s face with a wet-wipe from his backpack. It was a little distracting, the way his tongue poked out of his lips and his brow furrowed while he listened, but “I like wrestling” was an easy enough point to make. When he finished talking, Eddie realized he had started slouching into Stan’s touch. He drew back.

“You know you can tell me about anything, right?” Stan said after folding the wipe and tucking it away for the wastebasket.

“I guess,” Eddie said. Realizing how childish he sounded, he sat up a little straighter.

“And liking wrestling is a pretty stupid thing to hide from everyone.” Stan winced as if realizing how that sounded. “No offense.”

“None taken.” He leaned back into the wall, and Stan followed suit, albeit tentatively. “I guess I just got so caught up in keeping it from my mom--you know she’d have a bird.”

“Oh, I know,” Stan said, and they settled into comfortable silence.

Eddie didn’t realize until after Stan left that he’d missed his bus.


End file.
